George “Ron” Mangun receives $2.7 million grant from NIH to search for attention-related microstructures in the human brain. “We are going to investigate brain attention systems with a higher resolution than has ever been attempted in humans,” said Mangun, distinguished professor in the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain and the Departments of Psychology and Neurology. Mangun and his collaborators will measure brain activity in volunteers with simultaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalographic recording (EEG) — a feat that requires the combined expertise of engineers, psychologists, neuroscientists, statisticians and physicists.

The research team also includes, from UC Davis: Steven J. Luck, distinguished professor of psychology and director, Center for Mind and Brain; Emilio Ferrer, professor of psychology; and Costin Tanase, technical director, Imaging Research Center, and clinical specialist, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Mingzhou Ding, the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Florida, is co-principal investigator with Mangun.